What’s it like to be the target of leftist hate?

I know from my own experience that one of the hardest things about being mobbed is the feeling of isolation, of being a social pariah. I was able to fall back on the support of my family and close friends, but others have found the experience so traumatic they have attempted suicide—in some cases, successfully.

This is a particular danger for people working as freelancers. That was brought home to me when I met Stephen Elliott, the writer and filmmaker falsely accused of rape on the Shitty Media Men list in 2017.

He pointed out that many of the other men named by anonymous accusers in that McCarthyite document were full-time employees of reputable media companies and, as such, were able to clear their names after being put through a quasi-judicial process by their employers. (Although some lost their jobs.)

As a freelancer, Stephen wasn’t entitled to any equivalent due process and he lost one gig after another, with people just assuming he was guilty. He lost potential Hollywood and advertising jobs, he was uninvited from conferences, his new book got almost no coverage, essays and fiction he’d written were unpublished, his literary agent dumped him, and close friends stopped returning his calls.

He became a shut-in and a drug addict and decided to end his life. He put together a suicide kit and did a “trial run” that involved driving to the top of a hill near his house, smoking a lot of pot and fastening a plastic bag over his head.

But thankfully he had a change of heart and, instead, decided to fight back. His defamation suit against the compiler of the Shitty Media Men list is currently wending its way through the New York courts.

Imagine the sort of world the people who did this would create if they were in charge. Straight out of Animal Farm.